By default, Google Analytics include a lot of valuable reporting features. By simply using the default reports you can extract a lot of insight in to how your website is used.

With event tracking, you can take your analysis of how users interact with your site to new levels of granularity.

By adding a tag to an “onclick” function you can begin to augment your reporting with data reflecting actions taken by your site’s users.

The tag contains two mandatory sections, that of the “Category” and “Action”. There are then two more optional sections that you can customise to enhance the detail of the data you’re collecting- “Label” and “Value”.

An Example Of Using Event Tracking

As an example you may wish to track clicks on your social profile buttons if you’re looking to direct people to join your communities across the major social networks.

In this instance you may categorise the interaction as “Social Profiles”, the action as a “Profile Click”, the label “Facebook”. If you know on average it costs £2.5 to get a Facebook Like via their advertising platform you could include 2.50 as the value. When you’re not advertising on Facebook but achieving Likes then this type of tracking will be a great way of showing what you have SAVED the company in monetary terms.

So to summarise the interaction you want to track:
• Category = Social Profiles
• Action = Profile Click
• Label = Facebook
• Value = 2.50

That will then look like the following piece of code:

onClick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘Social Profiles’, eventAction: ‘Profile Click’, eventLabel: ‘Facebook’, eventValue: 2.50});”

Place that in the link to your Facebook profile and you’ll then be tracking when people click your Facebook profile link.

If you have other social profiles all you will need to change is Label to the appropriate social platform and the Value. Remember, if you don’t have anything specific for the value you don’t need to use it. Same for Label.

The helpful people at Raven tools built gaconfig.com which includes a tag builder for Google Analytics on-click events.

To analyse events once they are in place, simply navigate to Events report in Google Analytics:

Google Analytics – Behaviour – Events – Top Events

Practical Uses Of Event Tracking

Here are some practical uses. By no means is this list exhaustive, we have written a blog post that goes into Event Tracking in more detail and includes more examples. You can find it here:

• Pdf downloads
• Clicks on external links
• Clicks on adverts
• Clicks on social buttons
• Add to basket clicks
• Start Live Chat clicks
• Videos:
• Play clicks
• Stop clicks
• Pause clicks
• Duration
• Game assets:
• Which game played
• Levels reached
• Player scores
• Level # or points totals where drop offs occur
• Page: Scroll reach is an excellent way of qualifying blog post bounce rates. Blogs can see a high bounce rate but this isn’t always a bad thing, blog comment left, review tracking
• Form completions:
• # or % complete
• drop off point
• # or %errors
• Ecommerce:
• Shipping details
• Stock levels
• Price of product
• Type of card used
• Paypal
• Discount code used
• Product size
• Colour

Important Things To Note

Keep in mind: personal information can’t be stored in Google Analytics such as names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. Doing this can lead to having your account banned.

Keep in mind: incorporating anything business sensitive (such as profit margin or trade costs) within a tag can be visible by viewing the source code of a page, you can however fire the event server side to keep that information.

Keep in mind: Rank tracking event tracking is now less effective due to the rise of (not provided). Google now will only pass keyword specific data from searches where the user is not logged in to a Google product.

For more information about Event Tracking in Google Analytics please see For more information on Google Analytics, visit or find out more about our Website Analytics services here: .

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